The monk, Gregory, did not show up for the morning Sermon.
"Does anyone know where Gregory is?" the abbot asked the other monks.

"He's been drinking the Buddha's Koolaid again and has a hang over," Sam answered.

The abbot's nose blushed rose.

"Let me remind everyone that drinking the Buddha's Koolaid is verboten and is a one way ticket outta here!"

Remember also that laws come into and out of being to serve particular interests and can be interpreted and executed with bias.

What if you had to pay a gratuitous tax for every extra window you wanted to put in your house? Such laws likely have little to nothing to do with what is right or wrong in a moral sense.

Best get to the objective truth of the matter then...

:snicker:



Do you think that I am serious?

You've absolutely cracked Wheatley. Mary Poppins is a fictional character in a film (with a crappy sequel). To my knowledge there is no cult behind it. I was merely commenting on the actual content of the sequel.

True but unfortunately Michael wasn't able to save his home from a fire. It burnt down due to a stuffed up chimney. The chimney worker that the Bank's family used died from lung cancer and was unable to clean the chimney in Michael's home. The Chimney was left unclean for many years until said fire. — Wheatley

You've strayed from the Poppins orthodoxy (the facts of this fiction). You're gonna have to provide evidence for your claims.

Well, can the existence of others be used to prove my non-existence? — Eric Souza

Most folk have a general idea of how to determine whether you are dead or alive. They can listen to your heart beat, check to see if you are breathing, take your temperature, or take further lethal action to achieve certainty.

Generally living rational folk dismiss the possibility of ghosts due to lack of evidence.

If there were no other people to determine whether you were dead or alive then of course it'd be up to you to affirm it.

:nerd:

Thank good Fiduciary Sense that Michael Banks didn't feed the birds, invested his tuppence and was able to save his family home from being foreclosed upon.

I'm wanna be antiphilosopher in a philosophy forum and I'm not educated enough to call myself anything but a doubting kindergartner.

Let's go fly a kite.

Here's hoping for sentient blob networks and eusocial insect civilizations. No more dirty apes!

Life probably would look a lot similar on the same kind of planet but there are probably countless alternative ways to achieve our current functionality and it need not occur.

All the philosophical banter about self has little if any impact and probably pales beside the dramatic shift of perspective Zen provides. — jgill

The banter is almost koan like. One is left scratching there head as to why a flat out refutation of the self makes sense as if it ought to have been something fixed and unchanging in the first place (ie. a soul). Zen narratives are all about this kind of refutation of self, whereas I glean Zen is really about sitting with "empty awareness" and not thinking much. Though Zen is also committed to a Buddhist tradition and doctrine which guides moral action. So even if there is no self to die, no self to murder, there is still attachment to the world in the practice. You can't have your Zen that isn't Zen (cake and eat it too). You can't kill the Buddha if the man you'd kill is Buddha (says who?).

One might say that the necessary perceptions and attendant actions nominally ascribed to "a self" are the result of unknown forces. A person has no causal power born of the self. We have the illusion someone is driving the machine but this is just "empty awareness." Or my words are empty bullshit.

Energy flows freely as the universe moves from low to high entropy. Life needs the flow to maintain its local order but in doing so it negligibly increases the break down of the universe.

In order to make an omelette after the sun dies, you're gonna have to get creative.

So I would say that the self is an idea, a thought around which all thought becomes organised, that becomes all important. I call this process of thought 'identification.' Starting like this is has the advantage that it is clear from the beginning that we are not talking about the physicality of the human being, but of the construction of an image in the mind. Now I can say very simply that I, unenlightened, am writing this post, having these thoughts and pressing these keys, but that all these things can perfectly well happen, and happen even rather better, without the idea of myself intruding at all. — unenlightened

But suppose there was somekind of civil unrest in your city and this produced a certain amount of worry about your person or property. Does any projection of the future self and its well being amount to an intrusion of the self in one's mind (ex. the self is thinking about the conditions of its continuity). It seems this is about the physicality of self.

The whole reason we imagine the self is to ensure its continuity. Granted there might have been a time prior to this where instinct served us well in the absence of self-awareness. I'm sure many would argue that the neurotic self-obsession of modern times has become a kind of self harm. Just like it's good to eat food in moderation, so is it to avoid over-thinking or worrying about future states, but this is easier said than done.

Is this sort of what you mean?

If there is ultimately only one thing that exists, the whole thing, which is reduced or divided into aspects, parts, functions, multitudes, then it is the universe.

It's like Hilbert's Hotel. Whatever is has a room in the universe motel.

This is more a subject for Zen meditation. There one learns, or experiences one's "I" as a fabrication. Instead of "I am aware" there is only awareness. An instant of realization is worth more than a lifetime of philosophical dialogue. — jgill

I think you ought to mean a life time of practice is worth more than an instant of realization. :P Especially if there is "nothing" to realize.

So if there are no selves in whatever this metaphysical sense is, is there also no things?

Why isn't a "self" just an object with a special status.

I don't think "insanity" is a psychiatric diagnosis.

If the patient knows they have a psychiatric condition where states of control and self-awareness cycle on and off, then the patient may well have a reasonable grasp of their own problem.

I agree its less likely for someone with chronic psychosis to be aware of how crazy they are.

It's really ok, they are all versions of modbot. They can't be held accountable and their creators are inaccessible, just like Terminix customer service.

The moderating algorithms maybe biased but its for our own good, probably.

They erase harmless threads when they could just as well move them to The Lounge. I guess that takes extra computational work.

When VR (virtual reality) becomes realistic enough will anyone remain unplugged? — Benj96

It would depend entirely on the incentives/disincentives of being plugged in. What are they currently with respect to VR?

Has work been moved into a VR space and is now a requirement for maintaining basic economic needs? Or is VR just a luxury experience like video games that folks play in their spare time?

What about physical maintenance of the body? Can the body do its thing while its consciousness can play.

Has this world reached a state of sustainable providence by AI and robotic labor, such that folks are free to choose how to spend their time?

It seems that a substantial amount (>50%) of heat lost by human beings in a cool temperature is due to thermal radiation (mostly infared light?). I guess that is why mylar blankets work if you can insulate yourself well enough and why a thermos has a reflective material on the inside. It's counter-intuitive to think we're losing heat because were emitting so much light.

The temperature fluctuations due to EMR in space are glaring due to the lack of an ambient buffering system (atmosphere, et cetera).

Are you gonna get meta about your physics question?

Interesting question. It seems the temperature of deep space is actually related to the heat transferred by the cosmic background radiation. Whatever is put in deep space doesn't get colder than that because of the radiation.

So temperature in a vacuum is related to electromagnetic rays passing through its space, heating whatever mass is in that space.

Well, imagine a situation where the state represents the will of God and delivers punishment for those who transgress divine law.

Eternal damnation might take the form of life sentence and torture until death (the end of eternity).

See South Korea.

When is a dead cat no longer a cat? To be or not to be... a dead cat, that is the question.

Hmmm... Important philosophical wonders.

Radio Lab: Poop Train

Somewhat amusing podcast about biosolids from New York City sewage plants being transported to Colorado for use in agriculture for a time.

My own city makes this stuff, biosolids (sewage cake), but I bet it gets thrown into the landfills. Apparently studies show that it's ecologlically safe but I wonder how exhaustive the testing has been.

Be glad you were born into a somewhat stable(?...) wealthy country where your grievances are minor. You're not typing from an arid internet cafe in Mauritania, are you? South Korea?

By our current expectations about conveniences, the past was a total shit show. A look at history should make us misanthropes, or reconcile to us how terrible we have been and will be in the future.

1. Will technological evolution make us have new desires that our current brain cannot imagine? — Eugen

If we give a wild ape some cake with the certain knowledge that it has never tasted anything like it (cake), do we conclude that the ape potentially has a "new desire" based on the memory of that cake?

Or think about opiates with humans which highjack the pleasure reward system. Prior to trying such drugs can a person really imagine the desire (pain of addiction) or pleasure (super high) it elicits.

Desire usually entails a lack of a previously encountered stimuli and that stimuli having been integrated into habit. The satisfaction in the encounter of such stimuli is somewhat dependent on the severity of the desire for it. For example: someone who is extremely thirsty finds greater satisfaction in drinking water.

I'd say that there are no "new desires" if were limiting the term to the full continuum of whatever the maximum or minimum configurations of pleasure are. However, desire isn't really separate from the object (stimuli). I don't think it really makes sense to speak about objectless desire.

It is impossible to desire something without being able to imagine it. — Sir2u

Unless of course you are seeing what you desire and there is no need to imagine it.

There must be some animals that still desire despite a complete lack of imagination.

A quottle is a grain of something between salt and sugar. So take what I say with a quottle.

Please name one thing that you can desire without imagining it first. — Sir2u

The Quottle. I can't imagine it but desire it. Let desire shape its form.

Check out the adaptive dissipation theory by Jeremy England and others.

Very basically I think it is that matter can organize itself to dissipate heat more effectively under certain conditions and this might be a framework for understanding how life started.

Clothes are more practical in Northern latitudes for races who lack pigment and to keep warm. Humanoid species lost their hair for some reason and this increased the practicality of a manufactured cover to protect vulnerable parts. Even in more benign equatorial latitudes where nudity in hunter-gather groups might be more common (sans Western influence) covering genitals might make sense.

Current inherited customs likely grew around a very basic practical need for clothes while engaging in physical work.

If you dug into game theory there might be some sense in which clothes actually perform some kind of Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) function on par with "poker face" type behavior in animals. The less you show in terms of weakness or strength the more you stand to gain when deciding how to act against a competitor or collaborator. It levels the playing field of first impressions.

To some extent the severity of the taboo for any of us is an accident of history. The larger and more sophisticated the society, the more stratified it is by status and property, the more severe the customs imposed are out of a need to maintain order.

What do you mean you don't know what it is? You tell me Professor Sushi. What you see is what you get, a fragment. I won't participate anymore sense I'm unlikely to write as much as required.

It is a juxtaposition of two absurd scenarios which are fact based for the most part, one about accidentally killing snails and the other about saving them.

The Rube-Goldberg machine is suppose to introduce a sense of absurd causal determinism which involves as much of the universe as it can be imagined to involve.

Ideally there would be some illustration of the pointlessness of either saving a dying species or accidentally killing an invasive one, in light of what gives rise to these actions.

Dennett is definitely a zombie created by the blind process of natural selection.

His consciousness is an illusion, born of competing neural circuitry.

Maybe claims for and against Trump based on what he has or hasn't done should be backed up with linked citations, not that anyone would believe any of them.

Copper sulfate pentahydrate (26% solution) was applied to a 40,000+ gallon concrete pond complex at between 5-7 gallons per surface acre of 4 foot depth. The goal was to eliminate floating algae that resembled turds.

Days later the devastation to the pond snail population was apparent. A thick foul smelling protein foam coated the surface of pond # 3 with hundreds of tiny floating empty shells.

The pond snails were dead, along with the dragonfly nymphs.

The man who might be charged with this mundane collateral damage, the poisoner, was really just another vital mechanism in a much greater network of looping and crossing Rube-Goldberg machines.

__________

Miles upland, in the K range, a great plastic wall protects the last tribes of a dying species, Achantinella fuscobasis, from rats and rose colored wolf snails.

The woman in charge of preserving these lives in a shell counts them all to the rhythmic beats of another Rube-Goldberg network, whose modular causal chains necessarily involve a helicopter, the Smithfield Foods plant and the memory of a fossilized Ammonite.

Learned helplessness is one theory for developing depression.

A person is continually stuck in a stressful situation where no natural action can ameliorate the stress. They become conditioned to accept such negative states.

It is likely a mistake to project the unique human capacity for suffering onto animals. We have a rather sophisticated sense of self having a past and a future. The worrying about these imaginary selves is not a irrelevant aspect of human suffering and should be taken into account.

Worst possible outcome? — Shawn

Hell has exits, one hopes. The Buddha on your shoulder might whisper something about "mindfulness" and the imaginary friend on the other might say something about benign distraction.

When a solipsist isn't thinking that he is a solipsist, is he a solipsist in that moment?

Solipsism is a manifestation of loneliness most likely. Find a distraction and don't indulge in nightmares.

How does one stop being a solipsist once one? — Shawn

Stop thinking about it.

In the end any appeal to rights requires whether they are recognized by whoever/whatever is obstructing them.

Do crocodiles have a justice system? If I go swimming in a croc infested pool, have I ceded the natural rights to my life, if I indeed have a natural right to life?